Latest analysis – Page 55
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Features
Schemes get on track for central clearing
The European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) – like most new legislation – has its share of critics. It will hit derivatives players, of course, who have lamented the increased costs the new rules will entail. But it could also have a deep impact on pension funds and their governance.
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Features
The managed decline of DB pension funds
The death of defined benefit (DB) funds has, in some form, been prophesied for decades, but the latest threat of closure – stemming from the publication of statutory guidelines on Ireland’s new funding standard – may well prove to be a real and insurmountable threat to final salary schemes in the country.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from Brussels: A welcome day
You can almost hear the sound of satisfied occupational pension fund representatives rubbing their hands together at the news that the IORP II Directive has been postponement.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from the US: Taft-Hartley blues
Labour unions are not having the best time. Last month they suffered a major setback in Wisconsin, where Governor Walker won a recall election against union members and Democrats, who were protesting against his law removing most collective-bargaining rights from public employees. One reason why the unions lost is that those rights had assured very generous pension benefits to unionised public employees.
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Features
Look closely in the land of the cuckoo clock
Switzerland. Picture perfect, with its snow-capped mountains, glistening lakes and clean air. In fact, air pollution is a major environmental concern in Switzerland.
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Features
Risky business
Some 43% of the respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey had investments that were not benchmarked. Of those respondents that did, it is no surprise that illiquid and non-listed assets dominated – real estate, infrastructure and private equity – along with some absolute return and cash mandates.
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Features
Greece will have to ‘win ugly’ again
With hindsight, it all peaked at 20.42pm, eight years ago on 4 July.
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Features
Straitened times, new measures
This year’s IPE Top 400 Asset Managers survey charts a flatlining global asset management industry with total AUM of €36.3trn at end-2011, a whisker up from the previous year’s total of €36.2trn. And despite striking a rare note of optimism in this month’s magazine as we report projections for the Turkish pension market to grow to €100bn in 10 years, the outlook is also gloomy for Europe’s pension markets. European institutional assets were down 3.5% in 2011, according to our survey.
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Features
From our perspective: The belt tightens
Europe’s economic turmoil is depressing defined benefit (DB) pension funding levels as yields drop and coverage ratios move in tandem. The fall in the 30-year euro swap rate from 2.54% to 2.19% between 25 Apr and 15 May makes certain that rights cuts will have to take place at Dutch pension funds, which have little hope of recovery in the short term. UK pension funding levels, and those in other countries, have also moved south, with implications for asset allocation and policy making.
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Features
Regulation more worrying than contagion
News last month that JP Morgan Chase reported more than $2bn (€1.6bn) in trading losses brought to mind the fears of 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers shook the financial world to its core. But the main difference between now and then is that participants in the derivatives market seem more concerned about new regulation than about the threat of contagion.
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Features
Engagement prompts accountability
Proposals for a binding vote on shareholder remuneration, as set out by the UK department for business, innovation and skills earlier this year, could give institutional shareholders a platform to speak out on an issue that has grown in importance since the crisis.
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Features
Faith in the long term
A notable feature of the institutional investors’ panel at the Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles at the end of April was a faith in the ability of investors to reap long-term risk premia and a determination to do so.
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Features
Moment of reckoning
The 300 Club, a grouping of leading investment professionals, believes that modern portfolio theory and practice are failing institutional investors at a time when depressed funding levels require smarter ways of investing. It has issued its first paper, The Death of Common Sense, written by Amin Rajan, a member of the 300 Club and a regularcontributor to IPE. We asked him some questions
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Opinion Pieces
Long-term Matters: Shareholder Spring?
The recent AGM votes on executive pay at UBS, Barclays, Aviva and Citi are obvious signs of fundamental change, no?
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Features
Diary of an Investor: We all agree… but
Everyone agrees about the problems. And everyone agrees that institutional investors need diversified, long-term, risk-managed portfolios to help them meet their liabilities. At least, that is what I concluded after I attended the latest Worldwide Institutional Investing Conference in London last month.
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Opinion Pieces
Letter from Brussels: HFT debate hots up
The debate in Brussels on high-frequency trading (HFT) is heating up. The main forum is the European Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee (ECON), which in July will clarify its position with a vote.
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Opinion Pieces
Wisdom of independence
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, independent US asset managers have increased their revenues and profitability more than the asset-management subsidiaries of the larger US financial institutions. Publicly traded asset managers posted median profitability of 35% last year, compared with 25% for subsidiaries, and grew revenues 15% during 2011, compared with 6% for subsidiaries, according to recent analysis from Casey, Quirk & Associate, a consultant to the global asset management industry.
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Opinion Pieces
EC backing for VC
Radical changes in opportunities to invest in venture capital (VC) are emerging via the EU, including in Brussels, where the European Parliament is now vetting a draft Regulation on European Venture Capital Funds. The package aims to make it easier for VC funds to raise capital from across the EU.
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Features
Like father, like son
Whenever my four-year-old boy asks me how old I am and I tell him the truth, I am invariably met with a look of horror that anyone, anywhere, could ever be that old. His incredulous, somewhat disgusted expression is an apt reflection of how I sometimes feel when I read reports on ageing and it dawns on me how most of us are going to be doing a lot more of it in future.
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Features
QE – like pensions – isn’t just an over-60s issue
Here in the UK, the government’s Budget just changed personal tax allowances. Over-65s can earn about £2,500 (€3,055)more than under-65s before being taxed – but from April 2013 that allowance will be frozen until it comes into line with that for under-65s.
